1 Goals of Gforth

The goal of the Gforth Project is to develop a standard model for
ANS Forth. This can be split into several subgoals:

Gforth should conform to the ANS Forth Standard.

It should be a model, i.e. it should define all the
implementation-dependent things.

It should become standard, i.e. widely accepted and used. This goal
is the most difficult one.

To achieve these goals Gforth should be

Similar to previous models (fig-Forth, F83)

Powerful. It should provide for all the things that are considered
necessary today and even some that are not yet considered necessary.

Efficient. It should not get the reputation of being exceptionally
slow.

Free.

Available on many machines/easy to port.

Have we achieved these goals? Gforth conforms to the ANS Forth
standard. It may be considered a model, but we have not yet documented
which parts of the model are stable and which parts we are likely to
change. It certainly has not yet become a de facto standard, but it
appears to be quite popular. It has some similarities to and some
differences from previous models. It has some powerful features, but not
yet everything that we envisioned. We certainly have achieved our
execution speed goals (see Performance)1. It is free and available on many machines.

Fußnoten

[1] However, in 1998
the bar was raised when the major commercial Forth vendors switched to
native code compilers.